The front page of the Sunday St. Louis Post-Dispatch includes a list of notable quotes from the weak. One of the quotes in today’s paper read, “You can’t secure America from the District of Columbia.”
At first I nodded in agreement. Indeed, considering things like the Patriot Act and other proposed “anti-terrorism” legislation increasingly encroaching on our constitutional rights, often the more pressing threat to our civil liberties aren’t terrorists or rogue nations but the elected officials supposedly trying to defend us from them.

Until I saw that the quote was from Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security.

Somehow I don’t think he meant that sentence in the same way that I originally parsed it.